I've found an interesting bug in Windows XP Home. It's well known that one of the removed features in XP Home is the Group Policy Editor, gpedit.msc. It's a pretty useful tool, as any administrator will tell you, but it's not necessary for home use.

However, although the editor is unavailable to you, the settings it creates are still perfectly valid. So, if I track the change gpedit.msc makes on a Pro machine, export it, and import it on a Home machine, if that effect isn't specific to Pro, it'll affect the Home machine.

I found this out while scrubbing some systems at work of malware. I've had two in the last week that were XP Home machines that you could not change Windows Firewall settings on from the Security Center. Go into the Firewall control panel, and you'll be greeted with a happy message.

For your security, some settings are controlled by Group Policy.

One of my coworkers figured that it had hit that registry setting, and sure enough, it had. Removing the key fixed the issue. But there are a ton of far-reaching settings in gpedit, and the effects of this could be disastrous. Realistically, Microsoft should either release a gpedit for XP Home, or release a patch (or twenty) for home that disables checks to this key.

If you have a similar issue, the key is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\StandardProfile\EnableFirewall

1 = firewall forced on
0 = firewall forced off
no key = manual control enabled

I'm going to integrate the ability to disable this key into the next version of WURT. I feel that it's worth integrating and is relatively pertinent. I may also make a tool just to fix this.

WURT .4 Beta should be available in just a day or two. It'll also have a few fixes, although nothing for the annoying History/Temp folder cleaning bug. Most of the changes aren't visible, but it's much more efficient now.